A warped and irreverent spin on your typical comic book movie, Kick-Ass mixes gleeful violence with dark comedy in this loving adaptation of Mark Millar’s comic series of the same name. Armed with nothing but a scuba suit and potentially fatal naivety, Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) transforms himself into Kick-Ass, a baton-wielding superhero with no powers, no training and no clue what he’s doing. When the unassuming high schooler’s crime-fighting goes viral, Kick-Ass inspires a wave of imitators, including father-daughter duo Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) and Hit Girl (Chloe Moretz), and Kick-Ass finds himself in the crosshairs of the local drug kingpin (Mark Strong).

Critics and media watchdogs are already playing the morality card over Kick-Ass and its foul-mouthed 11-year-old vigilante Hit Girl, while the fanboy-fueled blogosphere has been equally breathless in their praise of the action-comedy. As always though, the reality lies somewhere in between, as Kick-Ass’ cheerful subversion is hampered by an inconsistent tone and some narrative missteps. And while British newcomer Johnson gets top billing as a blandly transparent audience surrogate, it’s Moretz who’s the true star, stealing the movie with surprising authority despite her young age. Meanwhile, the hilarious disconnect between Cage’s Adam West impersonation as Big Daddy and his Ward Cleaver act out of the suit makes their father-daughter plotline leaps and bounds more fun than Kick-Ass’ aimless origin story. The resulting imbalance between the parallel story lines is disappointing, but even more so is Kick-Ass’ mid-movie switch from a cleverly realistic twist on the familiar superhero formula to a boringly slavish adherence to it. It’s not so much the violence in Kick-Ass that offends then as the apparent notion that audiences won’t be smart enough to notice the bait-and-switch, or simply that they just won’t care.

Like any comic book movie worth its ink, Kick-Ass is pure over-the-top R-rated ultra-violence, specially designed to appeal to comic fans and action junkies. Director Matthew Vaughn stays true to Millar’s source material in all its profanity and gore, and it’s a credit to him that he was able to get this hard-R action-comedy to the screen without neutering any of the twisted elements that made the property a draw in the first place. Guy Ritchie’s former producing partner, Vaughn made a name for himself as a director with his debut feature Layer Cake, a 2004 British gangster flick that wore its debt to Ritchie on its sleeve. Now on to his third film with Kick-Ass, he turns in a stylish and fun comic book movie that nevertheless gives off a similar sense of déjà vu. For all the movie’s flash, Vaughn still hasn’t developed a visually distinct style of his own, making Kick-Ass play like a mash-up of other, more prominent directors’ greatest hits, from Quentin Tarantino to Zack Snyder (among countless others). But while that may make Kick-Ass’ action scenes less creative, fortunately it doesn’t make them any less entertaining.